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Tag Archives: Nestle Crunch

For this post I am sharing many different jobs related to chocolate. Although the color of chocolate was fairly unexciting, I discovered there were infinite varieties of brown. In fact, I mixed almost every color on my palette together in order to find them.

I began my career by making paintings that resembled photos. Now I work digitally by using photos and making them look like paintings!

These squares represent my digital work and are fairly recent. This is only a layout, which was gleaned from my photo reference. The painting that followed was more “illustrated.”

This is a marker sketch.

I always like to share my process with lines sketches. The texture for those curls varied considerably between jobs.

When illustrating chocolate curls and squares, there was never an end to art direction for tone and color.

Probably one of my first paintings that propelled me toward being a food illustrator was my Nestle Crunch Bar. It was painted in my last year of college and I learned how hard it was to hand-letter writing on the wrapper. But I loved the broken chocolate texture.

My painting.

This was the photo that I followed as my reference.

This is a close up of the broken chocolate.

I made a promotional postcard using this image. A decade later, I decided to paint a more exciting candy bar. This time I chose a Snicker’s Bar. Thankfully, I discovered a process to work with lettering that was more precise, although it still required painstaking detail and planning.

My photo reference.

I also had postcards made with this image and it was great for getting jobs. Art directors told me it made them hungry.

This label shows how a lot of detail is lost in the printing process. I was disappointed with how my painting looked.

I was told to remove this tiny drip.

This is a marker sketch and not the final painting.

In 1992, I won an award from the Society Of Illustrators of Los Angeles for my Snicker’s bar illustration.

My Snicker’s bar was such an excellent promotion piece that it led to a job illustrating a label for a Balance Bar. I wasn’t allowed to do drips for this painting and I sure missed them. At the end of this post, I’ll share more close-ups of the caramel and chocolate I loved painting.

This was my layout.

There is definitely an “art” to taking a bite out of something I’m illustrating.

Early in my career, I painted four labels for Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes. Once again, painting chocolate was fun and I had to resist snacking on my photo reference. Taking bites out of items was a whole other technique I developed!

The texture for chocolate definitely varied depending upon the product I was illustrating. Combining it with caramel or crispy rice, or shaving it for a curl was certainly different. And splashing, melted chocolate was probably the most difficult thing of all to illustrate.

So for this post, as I share many different jobs that related to chocolate I also share one that was not successful. It was for a chocolate-raspberry product. The line sketch for my art direction looks fairly straightforward. The actual product was dark inside and not very appealing. My final artwork was my best effort, but ultimately was rejected by the client and I was only partially paid.

This product was pretty challenging. I illustrated the raspberries separately.

I was told to put raspberries seeds in there and lighten the filling in contrast with the darker chocolate.

A fairly recent job of mine was for Kirkland/Costco. The illustration was for chocolate calcium chews. I share below my photo reference for the chews. I never liked illustrating splashes and was relieved that this one worked.

On this one, I had a lot of photo reference to choose from.

Some of these paintings were rendered with markers and colored pencils and others were created with watercolor dyes. I have a blog where I describe my technique and have a lot more information. It is at:

My painting of a Nestle Crunch Bar became my first promotional piece as an illustrator. It was printed on a postcard, which I handed out to art directors at agencies all over Los Angeles. I hand painted the lettering, but later in my career I learned methods to create more perfect lettering by using rubdown type. As an artist, I enjoyed rendering textures and discovering the many shades of brown in chocolate. This painting was created with watercolor dyes, before there was Photoshop. Some close-ups are below.

I have a blog where I describe my technique and have a lot more information. It is at:

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